


blood will have blood

by deckards



Category: Heroes (TV), Heroes Reborn (TV)
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-29
Updated: 2015-11-29
Packaged: 2018-05-03 21:55:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5308256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deckards/pseuds/deckards
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>and so noah bennet does what he’s always done; he buries his morals and he does what needs to be done. --- set between heroes and heroes reborn</p>
            </blockquote>





	blood will have blood

**Author's Note:**

> massive thanks to tywinning, zombielieutenant, and wherethefigslie for their editorial help and invaluable words of encouragement. without them, this would never have been written.

> monster are real, and ghosts are real, too. they live inside us, and sometimes, they win.
> 
> \---- stephen king

 

It’s dark inside the church and his footsteps echo loudly on the rotting floorboards. He blinks, trying to clear his eyes of the brightness from outside and he ducks behind one of the overturned pews, listening. A minute and then two tick by. The only sound is his ragged breathing, in out in out, little puffs of mist freezing in the air.

Another minute passes and he moves his hand to check the safety catch on his gun. The metal is cold and his fingers burn from being pressed into the grip; they barely unfold themselves to examine the parts, resist bending back in place.

The far end of the church is illuminated by a mote of pale white light streaming in from a hole in the roof and a few smashed windows that aren’t properly boarded up. A steady flutter of snow falls across the alter, landing in huge drifts like great white sand dunes. On the wall an old wooden cross hangs askew. Beyond that is an empty doorframe. From where he’s crouched, the wreckage of the church looms like splintered blue shadows. The doorway leads to a graveyard.

\----

**three weeks ago**

Noah Bennet’s ceiling is light grey and it’s spinning. He blinks at it a few times and then he squints, trying to force it to stay still. He reaches up to his face to check that his glasses are on, and they are, but the ceiling is still slowly revolving on an axis he can’t quite make out.

He sinks back into his threadbare sofa and he reaches for the mug of coffee resting on his end table. It’s cold. His head is stuffed full of cotton and everything is far away and there’s a feeling like nausea bobbing at the back of his throat, begging him to close his eyes.

He puts the mug down. He misses his mark and the mug chips against a small plastic bottle filled with painkillers; it’s what’s left from all that time ago when Edgar ripped his guts open, and last night it had seemed like a good idea to drag the pills out from where he keeps them behind a bottle of bleach under his bathroom sink.

More and more recently it’s seemed like a good idea. Something for the persistent, pounding headaches and the nights he lays awake staring into darkness and thinking about his Claire. Not his Claire: not anymore.

Lauren left two days ago and he hasn’t seen or heard from her since. He hadn’t been expecting to. She’d stood with her hand on the door and her bag at her feet, the sum total of their life together here in his apartment, and she’d said, “I’m leaving.”

And without moving from his seat on the sofa he’d said nothing at all.

She said, “Noah,” and the way her jaw was locked and how her fist was clenched against the space between them he could see she wanted to argue.

He didn’t have the energy. He was tired of this fight, the same fight they’d been having for so long now he’d lost track of the times and the days and the reasons. He remembered the lines, though. The scripted movements and spiteful barbs and the way it sounded when Lauren spat his name out like a poison, like the way she was now.

He said, “Yeah?” and even to his own ears he sounded like a fucking asshole, but anymore he wasn’t sure how much he cared. She wanted to leave; he wanted silence. At the time, anyway, it had seemed like the reasonable course for both of them.

She sighed heavily and there were tears sparkling in her eyes and very softly she said, “I’m leaving, Noah.”

And he said, “Okay.”

And she said, “Goodbye.”

And then she was gone, and that was the end.

The next day Angela sent him home from work when she’d noticed him trying to decide which part of his office floor would be the best place to lay down on instead of listening to whatever it was she had been saying. She told him she was placing him on “administrative leave.” He couldn’t tell if the look in her eyes was pity or anger or disappointment or revulsion; that room had been spinning, too.

And now here he is, sagging against the dilapidated cushions on his sofa with an old bottle of pills that’s quickly running out.

He picks them up and is going to spill them across his coffee table and count how many are left when his phone beeps. It takes him a few moments to find it, upside down on his kitchen counter and almost out of batteries. When he turns on the screen it shows he has a new text message, and for a second he thinks it might be Claire.

It’s not.

The message is from an unknown number and it reads, “Come out and play.”

Noah frowns at it for a long time and then he drops the phone and sits back down on his sofa and closes his eyes and falls asleep.

\----

It’s late in the afternoon when he comes to and decides he’s hungry enough to venture outside and pick up some food. He slips on a jacket and grabs his phone and doesn’t notice it’s dead until after he’s returned, a bottle of scotch in one hand and a bag of Japanese takeout in the other.

He plugs his phone in while he eats, not because he expects a phone call but because he’s done it so many times before it’s a habit now, like the Smith & Wesson taped to the underside of his mantle and the Company issue pistol he keeps next to his bed. Four bites into an order of six spicy tuna rolls his phone beeps another message at him. This time it says, “Won’t you come and play with me? I’m waiting.”

When he’s finished his food and he’s halfway through another of several glasses of scotch, his phone beeps and says, “Check your email, Company Man.”

Noah does and amid a slew of messages from work and spambots he finds something from Unknown Sender with the title, “Evo Raising Corpses?”

He opens it and he finds several attachments, PDFs of newspaper clippings detailing a series of encounters with the newly risen dead, and every explanation from a zombie outbreak to a full-scale apocalypse. Noah snorts. If Angela wanted him to deal with this, she could spare the time to make a phone call and he’s not interested in playing games with anyone else. He finishes his glass of scotch and pours another.

\----

He drags his hands down his face and is surprised to find a growth of course, prickly hair. It shouldn’t be a shock—he hasn’t shaved in days, not since Angela removed him from Primatech—but he’s gotten so used to feeling his skin, the hollows of his cheeks and the clean line of his jaw, that the thatch of stubble is unexpected. He pulls his hands away and looks at them framed against his ceiling.

His prescription bottle is sitting on his coffee table, nestled between a city of towering styrofoam takeout containers and a mess of empty glasses smeared with alcohol. He’s been ignoring the last two pills but now he’s laying in a pool of his own sweat, tangled up in a soaking wet v-neck and stuck to a pair of faded jeans and his head is pounding like someone’s piercing his skull with a drill and his stomach feels like someone has reached inside him and rolled it into a ball.

Without his glasses, the world around him is a blur, and maybe it’s better that way.

He reaches for the pills and his phone beeps and his hand stills in the stale air and he drags himself upright. His phone, it says, “You should stop me.” He’d thought these anonymous messages had ceased or maybe he’d just hoped they would because if they didn’t come he wouldn’t see them and if he didn’t see them he wouldn’t have to do anything about them.

After he received the email he’d asked around some of his old contacts and he’d dredged through the internet and he came away with an array of incidents pinned to a map on his wall and covered in Post-It notes. All indications point to this mystery Evo being somewhere near the Canadian border. Someone should stop him. But it’s not Noah’s job right now. It’s not his problem and it’s not his responsibility and he doesn’t have to deal with it. Or it wouldn’t be, if this motherfucker didn’t continue to send him messages, send him taunts, daring him to shut down whatever the hell is happening.

Noah grinds his molars together and squeezes his eyes closed. He gets up from his sofa and goes to change his clothes.

\----

The world is entirely without colour and it has been for miles. The sky is grey, the ground is white, and the road is a long line of black slicing through the flat, empty landscape. Ten songs after he crossed the border into Canada the radio spluttered into static and the only sound now is the sedan crunching over the frozen asphalt. From time to time a wheel will thud into a crack or a pothole.

When he finally pulls over it’s at small gas station, the only visible structure in any direction. He exits the car and the air that hits him is sharp and cold and burns his nostrils. A film of frost glazes the lenses of his glasses; neon lights hang in front of him, blurring into violent pink approximations of the letters G-A-S.

The building is covered in peeling white paint and blasted with weather stains. Noah walks toward the door, cursing himself for packing from habit and not reason and ending up with a suit and a tie and two guns and a knife and a pair of black leather Oxfords but no goddamn coat. He wasn’t expecting to pursue this, not really, and he certainly wasn’t expecting to follow the trail of one James Mitchell, Evolved Human, this far north. But here he is, with no backup, no partner, and no winter clothing, in the middle of a frozen prairie looking for a church he’s only heard rumours about because, somehow, that’s where this moronic fucking hunting expedition has taken him. It would have been more responsible to just shoot himself in the face. At least then his balls wouldn’t feel like they were about to snap off.

A bell tinkles when he opens the door and a man dressed in a heavy canvas jacket with a thick, knotty beard and short brown hair looks up at the sound.

Noah smiles and says, “Hello.”

Noah says, “I need some gas.”

\----

He closes his eyes and breathes in then out. His teeth scrape against each other as his jaw tightens, thrusts forward. He opens his eyes. The church is empty and still and he stands, slowly, glowering from side to side, his shoulders taut and the muscles in his arms clenched so hard they ache. He’s hunched over as he moves, stepping lightly, smoothly: hunting.

When he reaches the doorway, the white world outside is a blinding assault. He squints and he creeps into the graveyard and he sinks into the snow. His feet are numb and his ankles sting where snow has melted against his socks.

He moves further into the small graveyard and crouches down behind a tombstone carved like a broken pillar. All around him are rows of half-buried crosses and cracking headpieces, crooked teeth in a mouth full of nothing. The area is enclosed by a black fence buried in white snow and the midday light makes everything sparkle, casts shadows that are faint grey. Near the fence, bare trees like seizing hands rise up black on a pale sky. Black and white and grey and black and white and grey. The world here is in greyscale. Noah’s suit is dark blue.

There’s a noise like a bomb echoing through an empty place and his head snaps up and his eyes dart wildly across the scenery and his body is rigid, all angles and jutting limbs. His lips purse into a thin line and blanch under the pressure of his teeth. The noise, it sounds like the earth moving, churning, tearing. It sounds like something buried being wrenched free of the grave.

The noise stops, and a thick silence falls back over the graveyard.

A few feet in front of him, a dark smudge stumbles into his vision. It shambles toward him, arms groping at the sky, twisted fingers raking the air, each step wild and jittery. Snow kicks up in small white clouds as its legs stagger forward, slowly bringing it closer and closer and closer. Noah stands and aims his gun and the thing is near enough now he’s sure this must be one of the corpses raised by the Evo he’s hunting. The figure—the body—is more skeleton than flesh; a sexless, faceless abjection. Noah grinds his molars together. He forces his hands to relax and he pulls the trigger one, two, three times in a single smooth movement. The silencer on the pistol makes the gunshots sound like muffled screams.

A hole opens up in the corpse’s skull and two more shatter its ribcage, splintering it apart like a wooden boat crushed against a cliff. It collapses onto its knees and its bones crunch into the snow. A sludge of putrid entrails slide out of it and pool into a greasy brown puddle, steaming in the cold.

Noah tucks his gun into the waistband of his trousers and the metal is warm against the small of his back and he adjusts his spine to spread the feeling over the largest area he can. He stares at the broken mass in front of him and he wishes for central heating.

The thing shudders and shrieks and the skull shifts, its empty eye sockets focusing on Noah. His hands get caught up in the fabric of his blazer as he fumbles for his weapon. He hisses a string of Russian curses and raises his gun. He takes a step toward the corpse, then another. It doesn't move. It only stares.

The blackened pits of its hollow eyes are filled with shadows and nothingness. Noah can see through to the back of the skull where the whitewashed bone is caked in dirt and grime and as he gazes, the shape of the thing starts to change. Flesh starts to creep across the bone, a pale paper-like skin knitting together into the approximation of a face that’s colourless and blurry around the edges: indistinct, like an incomplete clay sculpture. He can smell burning rubber wafting out of the bullet holes.

Noah takes a step back and his lips curl and his front teeth grind together and his face contorts into a feral wolf’s snarl. He keeps his gun level and he scans the graveyard for the Evo, for any other sign of life.

The thing, its features now recognizably female, it gurgles and it groans and it smells like meat left to rot under a hot Texan sun.

The thing, it makes a noise that sounds like Noah’s name being called from under a lake of bile. The face it’s wearing belongs to Kate and while Noah was looking away a piece of metal appeared in its midsection, black and sharp and dripping with red, red blood.

For an instant Noah’s face collapses into a slack and vacant blankness and he tries to speak, tries to say something, anything, but he can’t find any words for this. For her.

She stumbles forward and somewhere under the snow a frozen twig cracks with the force of a sonic boom. The moment ends and he’s a wolf again, snarling again, hunting again.

He says, “No.”

He says, “Mitchell! Where the hell are you, you son of a bitch!” A stream of spit follows the words and his voice echoes across the vast, empty prairieland, bitch repeating again and again until it slowly fades away.

He says, “Kate,” and his voice cracks and his throat closes up and the word comes out hoarse and strangled. “Please,” he whispers and his gun wavers.

He wrenches his eyes away and glares at the horizon, at the unadorned black fence and the misshapen trees. “Mitchell!” he shrieks.

There’s laughter coming from somewhere Noah can’t quite make out. “Poor Mr Bennet,” says a male voice filled with a light, sing-song note.

Kate grabs at Noah, her skeletal fingers digging into the thin cotton fabric of his suit. Noah growls and wrenches his arm free and the violence of his movement tears her limb from her torso, separating them at the shoulder; it hangs limply onto Noah, dead and rotting. He staggers backward and hurls the corpse arm away from him. It lands nearby and sinks beneath the snow, leaving a stain on Noah’s coat and a stain on ground.

He pulls the trigger as fast as he can, too fast, and his arms shudder from the recoil. The bullets crack and snap and chip into Kate; seven more wounds explode into her and two new scars sear into an aging tombstone. Kate shudders and her body collapses in a pile of broken, brittle bone and a roar tears out of Noah, a wild noise that scrapes at the back of his throat and leaves his lungs empty, heaving for air.

The skull is just a skull now and it sits in a bed of soft white snow, shards of shattered humanity and gaping hollow lesions. Noah crouches down and brushes his fingers across it. It’s cold. There’s no life left inside, and it was never Kate to begin with. She’s buried far from here, in the sunlight and the warmth. These bones that wore her face, they never knew her smile or her laughter. Noah closes his eyes and reaches into his jacket pocket for his spare clip. These bones belonged to a stranger. Noah reloads his gun.

He stands and strides further into the graveyard.

He says, “I’m going to find you, Mitchell. And then I’m going to kill you.”

Mitchell’s says, “Those aren’t the rules, Mr Bennet. Mr Bag and Tag.” The voice is coming from an old gnarled tree at the back of the graveyard. He laughs and says, “Or aren’t you playing by Company rules anymore?”

There’s that sound again, the sound like the earth is collapsing in on itself, and there’s a scrabbling and a scuttering and then there’s three more corpses as ragged and decaying as the first.

“It’s an interesting subject, sin,” says Mitchell. “Many writers maintain that Pride is the head of all of them. Some even call her the Queen. And you certainly have plenty of pride, don’t you, Mr Bennet?”

Flesh starts to crawl across the skulls of these corpses, too. The pale skin is joined in ragged edges, put together like a suit of jagged motley, each piece slightly different and all of them fraying at the seams. Staring into these faces is like looking into a funhouse mirror or a kaleidoscope. Instead of the shattered aspects of himself, Noah sees Sandra and Lauren and Claire. All the women in his life.

All the women who used to be in his life.

“They won’t stop me, Mitchell.” His voice is a low growl and his face is a contortion of rage. He takes aim at Sandra first. He’s done it before when he thought she was Sylar, he can do it again. They’ve been apart for a long time and this is only a corpse. He can shoot her.

His arm is shuddering. He exhales a cloud of frozen mist. His arm is still.

Mitchell says, “Of course they won’t. After all, Pride never was your favourite sin, was it, Mr Bennet?”

Noah pulls the trigger and three bullets converge in Sandra’s head, exploding the skull into sharp fragments. The corpse collapses, like the other. Like Kate’s. He shakes his head. Not Kate.

The other two bodies are still shambling toward him, Lauren in front and Claire behind and both of them reaching out to him, grasping for him: desperate like the condemned seeking absolution. They start to blur and Noah’s eyes start to burn and it’s because looking at them, at these facsimiles, he’s—

He shoots again, this time emptying the rest of his clip into Lauren. Into the corpse. She—it—falls apart, and all that’s left now is Claire. His Claire. His daughter who won’t speak to him, who won’t even give him her number. His daughter who cut him out of her life, who recognized that he couldn’t be what she needed long before he ever did.

His voice is a hoarse whisper when he says, “Claire.”

Mitchell laughs and says, “No, not Pride. Wrath is more your speed, I think.”

Claire stumbles into Noah, clutching at his face and ripping at his skin. She smells like death.

Noah drops his empty pistol and throws himself sideways into the snow, crushing his ribs on the frozen ground underneath. The blood on his cheeks is warm. It dribbles onto his lips and it tastes like copper pennies.

Mitchell says, “Funny thing, though, about Wrath.”

Noah reaches down to his ankle and pulls his revolver out of its holster. Still on the ground, he aims it at Claire.

Mitchell says, “In many depictions, it is shown to be brutal, bestial, mindless.”

Noah says, “I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you.”

Blinking, he says, “I’m sorry I couldn’t be there for you, Claire Bear.”

He shoots her. The bullet, it passes right between her cloudy, sagging eyes and a spray of bone explodes out of the back of her skull. His daughter who can’t die, this corpse, this nightmare in front of him, it lurches forward and Noah fires one, two, three, four more times and his ears are ringing from the blaring of the gun and the body is in ruins, in shreds of tangled, rotten flesh and bones that are snapped into kindling.

There’s a smile in Mitchell’s voice and he says, “But take away its weapons, and in many depictions, Wrath is shown ultimately to be impotent.”

It’s so cold here there’s no moisture in the air and the snow is dry. Against the warmth radiating from his body, the snow starts to melt, frozen liquid slowly seeping into his clothes, pressing the cotton tight against his skin. Shivering, Noah staggers to his knees and looks across the four piles of brutalized bodies. There’s blood and bile splattered across the graveyard, a Jackson Pollock painting in red and brown and white.

Noah grips the revolver in his right hand and buries his face in his left arm, wiping it clean with the sleeve of his blazer. When she was young, Claire used to come to him with dirt smeared on her face and he would rub it away with whatever shirt he was wearing, while Sandra clicked at him in the background, bustling about to find a washcloth.

He grinds his molars against each other, tightening his jaw and pushing it forward. He gets to his feet and he takes one step and then another and then he’s marching toward the tree at the far end of the cemetery.

“Mitchell,” he says, spewing the word out like rancid meat.

Mitchell laughs and a small figure next to the tree darts toward the fence. Noah stops and aims his revolver and fires. The gun clicks, empty.

“Fuck.”

He drops the Smith & Wesson in the snow and lunges for the tree. Waves of snow trail in his wake as he runs, head down, shoulders forward, ready to crash into Mitchell and bury him in the ground.

Mitchell is gripping the iron fence, pulling himself up and over when Noah reaches him and he cries out when Noah grabs him, hard, and throws him face-first into the snow. Mitchell laughs and laughs and the sound echoes from every direction and Noah pulls a small knife from its sheath on the back of his belt and he hurls himself on top of Mitchell, pinning the slight body in place. He moans some muffled vowels into the snow and struggles against Noah, shifting and arching his limbs in a series of jolting, frenetic movements. Under Noah’s weight, Mitchell is slowly suffocating.

Swinging wildly, Mitchell manages to break free for an instant, thrusting a bony elbow into Noah’s abdomen. He gasps and jerks away and Mitchell tries to scurry free, flailing in the snow like he’s drowning. Noah reaches for Mitchell’s shoulder and rips it backward and flips him over onto his back and Noah plunges his knife into Mitchell’s gut, one, two, three times. The blade, metal tinted black with vicious serrations, slides in and out of the soft flesh easily, smoothly, and there is blood everywhere. It’s on the knife and it’s on Mitchell’s dying body and it’s on Noah’s hands and face and sprayed across the snow in great gouts of steaming red.

Noah’s breaths come in short, ragged pants. He sits back on his haunches beside the body and he wipes his knife on the leg of his trousers and he slips it back into its sheath.

Mitchell gargles and his body shudders. Noah looks at him for the first time, looks at his face, the face of a young boy. The face of a child.

Noah says, “No....”

Mitchell laughs again, a deep, rumbling chuckle; the noise isn’t coming from the boy’s still body.

Mitchell says, “Oopsie daisey.”

Noah says, “You son of a—” but he loses his voice before he can finish cursing, his eyes transfixed by the fragile corpse before him. The boy’s eyes are glazed and vacant. They used to be blue. His hair is stringy blond and it reminds Noah of Lyle.

A gust of sharp, bitter air blasts through Noah’s thin suit. He reaches out and closes the boy’s eyes.

Mitchell says, “Look at the mess you’ve made of things, Mr Bennet.”

Not looking up, Noah says, “Why?”

“Why?”

“How did you find me? How did you know I’d follow you?”

“Are those really the questions you want answered?”

Noah growls and says, “Who the hell are you?”

“Not James Mitchell. I’m afraid you killed him. And it’s such a pity: that young boy had a rather unique gift, don’t you think?”

Noah struggles to his feet and screams, “What the fuck do you want!”

“I want you to see yourself for who you really are, Mr Bennet. I want you to know you as I know you, as a killer. A monster.”

The man steps out from behind the shadow of the tree. He’s thin and wan, his face covered in a scraggly ginger beard. He stands in front of Noah, only a few inches away, and he says, “Boo.”

“Greyson.”

“So glad you remember. After all this time, I was worried you might have forgotten about me.” Greyson smiles, his face twisting into a cruel mask. “But I would never forget you. After all, you made me who I am.”

“I put you where you belong.”

Greyson shrieks and his spit flies into Noah’s face: “You put me in a cage! You locked me up like an animal and left me to rot!”

“You killed people.”

Greyson’s voice drops to a low whisper and he’s so close, Noah can feel Greyson’s breath on his cheek, can smell onions lingering on it, and he says, “But not as many as you.”

Noah reaches for his knife. Greyson pulls on the back of Noah’s neck, bowing his head forward, and into his ear he says, “ _You don’t want to do that, Bennet_ ,” and Noah doesn’t.

Grinning, Greyson says, “ _You want to let me go, and you never, ever, want to follow me_.”

Noah’s arms fall limp to his sides. Greyson, one hand still on the back of Noah’s neck and the other brushing a bleeding wound on his face says, “ _Think on your sins, Noah_.”

Greyson releases his grasp and smiles and walks past Noah and into the church and then he’s gone.

Noah blinks and looks around. The small boy’s body is still and freezing in the snow, blood crusting on his arms and torso. The sky is grey, slowly turning a darker shade, and the wind is picking up, whistling through the naked branches of the dead trees surrounding the graveyard.

Noah takes out his phone to call Primatech. Angela will have his ass for this, but anymore he doesn’t have the energy to care and someone has to clean this fucking mess up. He tries to dial the numbers, but he can’t pry his eyes away from the boy’s corpse. It’s so small. He slides the phone back into his pocket.

In the end he digs the grave himself, shoveling for hours with a rusted shovel he finds leaning against the church. It’s dark by the time he’s finally broken through the permafrost and the sweat is cooling on his skin, leaving him painfully chilled and caked in dirt and blood. He lifts up the tiny boy, the child, James Mitchell, and he weighs nothing at all as Noah lays him to rest in an empty bed of frozen earth. The grave is at the foot of the tree. Noah covers it over and into the bark he scratches a short epithet, some words he learned at school that sound too big for such a little body and still don’t seem large enough to convey, simply, I’m sorry.

He takes the shovel with him when he leaves, pausing only to pick up his empty guns. He doesn’t bother with the spent shell casings and he calls Primatech from his car. He has the heat on high and the headlights pick out the yellow centre line running down the road, a long black scar on the flat white world, stretching endlessly into darkness.

The circulation coming back into his fingers makes them burn. He still can’t feel his feet. He opens the glove box and inside is a bottle of prescription pills, the pills he promised himself he’d throw away. There’s two left.

\----

When Noah wakes up the next morning his car is out of gas and the battery is dead and the world is blank and grey. There’s an empty bottle of pills on the floor of the passenger seat and he’s freezing cold and filthy.

When Noah wakes up the next morning his hands are blistered and sore and they’re stained dark red, coated in dried, flaking blood.

  
  
  


end

 

 


End file.
